Applying the interlanguage approach to language teaching

The term interlanguage can be used to refer both to the object of investigation, i. e. learners’ L2 competences as instantiated in their linguistic productions, or to an approach to investigating such competences and describing such productions. In this second sense, it has major implications for both research and teaching, as it involves treating learners’ utterances as being based on separate linguistic systems, which need to be described in their own right, with no reference to other languages, including the L2. The didactic consequences of the interlanguage approach include, among other things, a different attitude towards errors, greater learners’ autonomy and a focus on linguistic experimentation and hypotheses-testing. The article reports on a project that applied these principles in some Italian primary schools. Pupils worked in groups to produce long, complex and well-organized written texts retelling a silent movie. Data collected at the beginning and end of the school year reveal that these experimental classes outperformed control classes on a number of dimensions, including group cohesion and motivation, text quality assessed with rating scales, and objective measures like text length, number of idea units, use of punctuation and cohesive devices. It is argued that interlanguage analysis and the interlanguage approach should become an integral part of teacher training in all areas of language education.